The Null Device

2007/12/4

Allegations have emerged of a secret mailing list used by a cabal of Wikipedia admins to unaccountably ban people they suspect of being enemies of Wikipedia trying to infiltrate the site. (The evidence against one banned user was that they seemed too skilled and too productive for a new user, and thus were probably a troll or sleeper agent trying to infiltrate Wikipedia and win its trust before doing god knows what.)

In this case, "wikipedia" turns out to be a type of fungus.
This is not the first time that a restaurant in Asia has listed "wikipedia" as an ingredient; some two years ago, a French restaurant in Taiwan listed cheesecake as "wikipedia", and there are other reports of another establishment using the word to denote squid. Could it be some quirk of novice attempts at Chinese-to-English translation that causes this word to be mistaken for so many culinary ingredients?